Literacy Professional Learning Resource – Teaching Strategies

Literacy to Learn: Getting students knowledge ready for literacy learning

Literacy to Learn 10 - Transcript

Voiceover: Towards the end of a lesson it is useful to have students review both what they’ve learnt and how they went about learning it. Petrina asks her class to identify what they know at the end of the lesson that they didn’t know earlier.

Teacher: Think of one thing that you’ve learnt that you didn’t know before today.

Student: Today I learnt that in ancient Egypt, pharaohs often married their sisters.

Teacher: Very good. That’s an excellent sentence.

Student: Today I learnt that in ancient Egypt poorer women didn’t wear shoes.

Teacher: Very good.

Voiceover: Alison asks her class to suggest why synonyms are useful to study.

Teacher: Alright, so we’ve just come up with some fantastic words there. How useful is coming up with synonyms for the words that we’ve just looked at and having sentences that we can use as well, using those words. How useful is that to you guys?

Student: It helps us understand the topic more.

Teacher: Good

Student: It helps us describing words, describing other ways.

Teacher: Describing it in other ways. Fantastic.

Voiceover: Long Van asks her class to reflect on the reading strategies they used.

Teacher: So what strategies did you use to predict the meaning of the story?

Student: We looked at the heading to see what it might mean.;

Teacher: Yes. You looked at the heading to try to work out what it might mean. Very good.

Voiceover: Michelle asks her class to review what they’ve learnt about ‘the right to express an opinion’ and the strategies that worked for them.

Teacher: What I want you to do is to think about what you’ve learnt today and how you learnt that information.

Student: We used the words that were in the sentence.

Teacher: Okay. So you used the words from the topic that I wrote up on the board. How did you use the pictures of the people demonstrating to come up with an understanding of this topic?

Student: I thought about what the people were thinking on that day and then put it in my own head and that’s how I though about the meaning and key words.

Teacher: That’s excellent. Well done, that’s good. One final question before we go, when do you think that you can use those strategies, those learning strategies again?

Student: If we have another activity like this one, we could piece all the information together.